


we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course

by aphrodite_mine



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Louisiana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 14:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphrodite_mine/pseuds/aphrodite_mine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A call from Agent Reyes brings partners Mulder and Scully down South where they chase monsters, and other things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ellydash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellydash/gifts).



> X-Files AU in which Fox Mulder is abducted as a child and Samantha pursues a career in the unexplained. Takes place in an altered present-day timeline. Title comes from the Adrienne Rich poem “Diving into the Wreck.” Many thanks to lilacsigil and mage_girl for looking this over.

*

Mulder is up to her shins in swamp water before Scully manages to stop the car safely on the gravel mess of a driveway and get the damned window down (damned window on a damned rental) in order to shout “I don’t think that’s safe, Mulder!” But Samantha has been talking about this Agent Reyes -- _Monica_ \-- since before they boarded the plane, (in between lengthy oratory on the nature of fear and the monsters we create) and Mulder’s never been one to let a little swamp water stop her for much of anything. Not a monster or a beautiful girl.

Roused by the splashing or the shouting, a figure comes to the window of the (to Scully’s admittedly untrained eye) rickety old house. The porch looks water-soaked, and the roof leans dangerously to the right. The woman in the window sweeps the curtains aside, ducking into the frame. When her eyes swing towards Mulder, her face splits in a warm smile. Scully clears her throat. “Come on, Mulder. Get out of the mud.”

*

Reyes can’t keep her hands still. Scully’s arms are crossed over her chest, and Mulder’s curious fingers are stuffed deep in her pockets, but Reyes moves around the bright kitchen touching cabinets, counters, a springy curl that’s come loose against Mulder’s neck. She shakes Scully’s hand, her bright, brown eyes asking for contact and getting it until Scully’s heart kicks her and she steps back.

“I’m sure Samantha told you I’d be grateful, Agent Scully, but I’d like to thank you personally for making the trip. If this was something I thought could be taken care of with Sam’s brand of blundering onto the truth, I might not have insisted you come. But science,” she pauses, her fingers moving again, this time to her lips, “I think, would be invaluable in this case.” 

“My pleasure,” Scully says, though she is far from sure that it _is_. She finds herself narrowing her eyes at the easiness between them, Samantha and Monica, an easiness she’d suspected on the plane ride but never caught wind of before then. She thinks -- not for the first time -- that there is still a lot about her partner that Scully doesn’t know.

“Come!” Reyes announces, slapping her hand indelicately on the kitchen table. “I’ll make drinks and give you the details I’ve scrounged together since I called.” Since Mulder has only told her that the case most definitely falls under their jurisdiction (meaning: an X-file) and involves some sort of local legend, Scully is grateful she’d get more details. Something new, something spiritual that has sprung up since the Flood. “You’ll appreciate the Biblical reference, Scully,” Mulder had assured her, leaning into her personal space in order to finish off a haphazard braid. “Be sure to bring your own laurel branch.”

“Water for me, thank you.”

“Got anything a bit more potent?” Mulder asks, nabbing the chair closest to where Monica stands, pulling glasses from a white-painted cabinet. “It was a long flight.”

Reyes pulls two beer bottles from her fridge, holding them both expertly by the neck. “Local brew?”

“Suitable,” Mulder answers, and it feels like an old routine, or an inside joke. Scully re-crosses her legs. 

She clears her throat. “You mentioned details, Agent Reyes.” She takes the glass of water offered to her, but doesn’t drink right away. Reyes makes short work of the bottle tops, hands Mulder a fizzing bottle, and sits down between them, comfortable as anything.

“A lot has changed here,” Reyes says, pausing to take a sip, “since Katrina. People have had to re-locate, rebuild. Start again. Really examine their choices. We’ve been busy--” she turns to Scully and leans closer, again initiating that full, deep eye-contact. “--the local FBI branch, I mean -- with some of the more, I don’t know, run of the mill stuff. We saw crime spike, decline, then rise again.” She settles into her chair again, apparently getting comfortable for a long explanation. Scully watches, for a moment, the reflection of the ceiling fan in her cup of water.

“You said there was a monster,” Mulder says, before Reyes can properly catch her breath.

“Thought you’d appreciate some local background,” Reyes explains, not quite smiling, though the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes indicate barely withheld laughter. “It’s not so surprising, I think, that a lot of people had...” she pauses, turning to Scully and nodding in her direction, “a crisis of faith.” _My cross,_ Scully thinks, immediately lifting her fingertips to touch the skin-warmed metal. “This, of course, manifests differently for different people: church revivals, the generation of new myths, turning from any gods altogether.”

“You think this creature is a fabrication?” Scully asks on behalf of her partner, who looks mildly disappointed at the suggestion. 

Reyes takes another drink, swallows, considers the question. “I don’t, actually. But it might explain why we haven’t heard of it before. We’re all willing to look at things a little differently, now.”

Mulder squints. “So this monster -- which you still haven’t described, by the way -- has always been here, but no one wanted to see it?”

“That’s what I’m proposing, yes. And be patient, Sam. Good things come to those who wait.”

“Not _much_ comes to those who wait, you mean,” Mulder teases, knocking Reyes in the arm, an easy physical motion that could mean nothing or everything. Scully tries to remember the last time Mulder touched her like that -- they are partners, after all -- and surfaces blank, thinking only of her fingers tight around Mulder’s arm, Scully trying to quell her own shaking. 

She’s not sure, then, exactly what she’s seeking.

Perhaps that is what scares Scully most about all of this.

*

The kitchen grows quiet, slowly punctuated by the sound of glass set against the table as Mulder and Reyes finish their beers. “It’s getting late,” Scully begins, already readying to push back from the table and stand. “This has been lovely, but it’s going to be hell to find our way to the hotel in the dark.”

“Hotel?” Reyes looks alarmed, seeking reflection first in Scully, then in Mulder, who only shrugs, smiling. “Nonsense. I have plenty of room here, comfortable -- and clean -- blankets.” She frowns, finger circling the lip of her bottle. “I could have sworn I told you you were welcome in my home, Sam.”

Mulder shrugs again, looking, this time, a little sheepish. “You know how the little details get away from me.”

“The details that aren’t crawling out of the ocean and snatching legs off of local innocents, you mean?” Sniping at Mulder feels comfortable, and lets Scully continue without surreptitiously examining her surroundings. The house didn’t look big enough to comfortably house one person, let alone three. At least, not three who kept to separate beds. 

“And besides. I couldn’t let you go wasting federal money on a hotel when we could spend the time catching up.” Reyes stands and plucks her and Mulder’s bottles from the table (ignoring Mulder’s protestations that she isn’t done). “Agent Scully, I’m sure you’re familiar by now with Sam’s complete inability to keep up communication unrelated to the Great Quest.” The words are sarcastic, but Agent Reyes speaks with a note of admiration. “Hell, I thought I’d have to be abducted in order to see you again, Sam,” she adds, murmuring under her breath, then looks up, knowing -- she _has_ to know -- that she’s broken the single, inflexible rule of Mulder’s existence.

Instead of exploding, or walking out, Mulder just laughs. “That probably would have helped,” she says, tipping back in her chair, crossing her legs at the ankles. She has to be thinking about Fox, but for the first time since they were thrown together seven years ago, Scully can’t see a trace of it in Mulder’s eyes.

*

Scully dreams of water. Of Samantha walking deeper and deeper, until she is only ripples on a quiet surface. Like glass, melting.. 

She is underwater herself, surrounded but still breathing. She dreams a white light, and there, lost in all that whiteness: Fox? The same image she’s seen for years, the childhood photo that sits on Mulder’s desk. Curly hair and the toothy grin of a boy, gone the summer Samantha turned seven.

Scully dreams of Samantha, washed up on the shore, of Reyes crouched over her body, dark against the morning sun.

*

Breakfast is an awkward reprisal of the night before; Scully rising to the chirpy sound of Mulder’s cell phone in the next room. It’s a few hours past dawn, thankfully, but Scully’s body is still sore from the flight. Insisting on the couch while Mulder took the guest room probably wasn’t the brightest of ideas, either.

She’s just stretching, her toes wiggling free of the blankets (clean, just as Reyes said), when Reyes herself emerges from the back of the house.

“Oh, good,” she says, smiling. She’s wearing a short robe over shorts and a t-shirt. Her legs are longer than Scully would have thought. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I apologize if our being here has disturbed your morning routine,” Scully says, utterly sincere. Her eyes follow Reyes through the doorway as she walks past, remaining on the empty space until, in a few moments, the sound of a coffee maker grumbling is punctuated with the dark, bitter scent of coffee brewing. “I’m sure we could have met up this morning just as easily.”

Reyes pokes her head around the corner. “I have cereal or oatmeal. And stop it, you’re insulting my hostess sensibilities.”

Scully can’t help smiling at that, still, she’s relieved when Mulder finally makes her fuzzy-headed appearance. “Starting without me, I see,” she quips, still rubbing fingers against her eyes. Mulder lingers in the kitchen doorway, one foot on linoleum, one on polished wood. “Don’t tell me you’ve only got soy milk, Monica. I’m not a big fan of drinking plants.”

“You’d rather drink the food a mother produces for her young?” Reyes ducks around the corner again, smiling at Scully. “Coffee’s ready.”

“Well, you know my breast fixation...” Mulder says as Scully shuffles past, looking at both of them, grinning, wolfish.

Scully stops, struck right in the spine with the words. She’s frozen, eyes wide.

Reyes sets twin mugs on the table, already laden with bowls and boxes. “Is that what that is?” Her eyebrows are raised. As if nothing has changed, Reyes reaches for the box of cereal (something with Oats in the name) and pours some, adding a splash of soy milk. Her rhetorical question goes unanswered, but Reyes doesn’t press. Her gaze flicks to Scully, who has only moved to grip the back of the chair she’d been headed towards. “Something is different about you this morning, Agent Scully,” Reyes says, spooning an over-full bite to her mouth and thoughtfully chewing.

Scully ducks under Reyes’ intense focus -- those laser eyes, again. Perhaps she is used to it from Mulder, but this woman changes the feeling of the entire room, just by patting the table, gesturing as she might for a child for Scully to take a seat. “I had a strange dream, that’s all.”

“A dream?” Reyes is intrigued. Her eyes light up as Mulder’s do when someone mentions _unidentified flying objects_. 

Scully can feel herself heating up, both their sets of eyes on her, expectant. She squirms, avoiding their eyes to stare into the rising steam from her coffee mug. 

“I believe,” Reyes says, filling the silence with her warm voice, the words dropping like a gentle hug across Scully’s shoulders. “In the power and truth of dreams. Some people may think the exercise futile and even a little silly, but I’ve discovered so much about myself and the things around me -- just from what my subconscious unravels.”

Mulder, mouth twisting in a pout at be left out, nudges at the box of cereal ( _Roasted Oats_ , it turns out) until it falls over. “Don’t we have a monster to find?”

*

“I’m certain the water is the best place to start. The religious and evolutionary connotations alone make these swamps the perfect breeding ground for something like this.” Reyes grunts softly as she tugs up her borrowed waders, unrolling the grimy rubber over her jeans. “Did you know that in Bombay, the locals immerse their elephant god in water. Something called the Ganesha Festival.”

“Like a kind of baptism,” Scully notes, already booted and standing, brushing herself for imaginary dirt, and making sure her gun is holstered properly.

Reyes smiles up at her. “Perhaps. Mm. Without the obligation.”

They trudge through what might be considered Reyes’s backyard, further out, until Reyes huffs “It isn’t much farther, I promise.” Quiet noises surround them, the stick and squish of the water and the mud underneath, chirps and twitters from birds overhead, but beyond that, Scully senses a deep silence. The quiet one might find at the bottom of the ocean, looking up.

A half an hour passes relative silence, until the trees open up and the sky blinks through. 

“This is the spot,” Scully murmurs, reaching carefully to free her gun from its holster. 

“How’d you know?” Reyes asks, doing the same, though she keeps her gun to her side.

“The birds have gone quiet.”

Mulder stares out into the sleepy-looking dredges. “It’s hard to imagine this as part of the ocean, part of Neptune’s playground.” And yet, it is. The vegetation here, growing from salt water, is nothing Scully’s familiar with. It all seems greener, somehow, on the backdrop of brackish blue.

“You’re just jealous no one ever saw fit to give you a triton,” Reyes says, nudging Mulder’s shoulder with hers, shooting Scully a conspiratorial grin. Are they friends, then? Is this all it takes?

“There--” Scully gasps, swinging her gaze, her hips, her gun-toting hands, sharply to the right. Have they conjured the thing, just by being here, willing to see it?

But she’s not sure she saw anything at all. A rustle in the leaves, perhaps.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Mulder sing-songs, off-key and wonderful. A small branch has affixed itself to her braid, making her seem younger, happier, than she is. Scully thinks of Fox, in the bright light, or in the water, and looks down, shifting her weight awkwardly in the waders.

Something knocks against the back of her right knee, and she drops, releasing an “oh!” as she splashes forward, hands out to catch herself. The water kicks up as someone -- _Mulder_ \-- splashes violently to her side.

“It’s there!” Reyes calls out, Scully pulling herself sloppily to her feet. Mulder takes her arm, a steady strength at Scully’s elbow. Reyes’s arms are extended, her eye on the horizon.

“I’ve got you.”


End file.
